#// hi i'm thinking about all the ways a lich emmrich could go bad don't mind me

[thanatologie]

anyone that says emmrich never actually faces his fear isn't actually paying attention. hear me out, okay, i've talked before (so many times) about how i think for emmrich his fear of death is less actual thanaphobia and more...his fear of being alone. of living alone, of spending eternity alone - especially in a culture and a society that places emphasis on lovers being buried together; he's terrified of it. and a romanced emmrich is so terrified of his relationship with rook - and how he feels - that he's willing to try to end it on the eve of a battle one or both of them might not come back from, because he's worried it might not be the big damn love story he's been aching for his whole goddamn life.

and guess what! rook doesn't come back.

he spends almost a month making that damn dagger - and like the rest of the crew - trying to find rook to pull them out of the fade prison because he's lost them. he's lost them right after realizing his fear's gotten the better of him and he's staring down the barrel of eternity without them. he was already trying to backpedal the whole thing before solas pulled his switcheroo and you know rook telling him they'll talk about it at home was like...a constant refrain in his head that whole almost month they were lost.

(which raises a good point with the mortal vs lich path in this respect, because a mortal emmrich was ready to tear open the fade to get rook back, imagine how many lines a lich emmrich might cross, especially given his line about never letting them be parted in this or any other world again. i have thoughts about how emmrich doesn't come back wrong from that, no, but he definitely comes back changed, he's...off. i've seen speculation that lich emmrich isn't emmrich - which i don't buy - or isn't entirely emmrich - which is a little more interesting and there may be some truth to the latter, or it could be he thinks he's indestructible at that point and gets really reckless and less measured but that is another argument for another time.)

and basically the point i'm leading up to here is...you can complain all you want that he never uses the l word before the final battle, but even with harding pointing out he's gotten a little spacey and distracted and mopey with a relationship on the burner, and all the other pet names he uses so damn liberally (dearest, darling, flame of my heart), he's still holding a lot of stuff back. he's still holding himself back, quite a bit, until that moment when he finally (finally) tells rook he loves them. he never calls rook my love until after the fade prison in the mortal path, and it's just the once, as far as i can actually remember. and it's because of all of that shit above.

(lich emmrich does it earlier, because that this may be my last chance to say it comes a hell of a lot sooner, and he uses my love liberally after that point.)

this is intentional on his part. this man has skirted around using the word love so much ("very fond of you" my ass) that rook totally has the option to call him out on it and it's like a record scratch.

he's, i think, terrified of loving something that can die? and he's terrified of being alone. and ultimately a romanced mortal emmrich has to face both of those things, one after the other, between manfred and the fade prison. and i think, going forward, it's not going to be completely gone - in fact for a hot minute after everything it's probably exacerbated to a large degree and he's probably extra...like that for a while - but it makes him confront those things head on in...very blunt ways. here's a reminder of what losing someone you love deeply to death feels like. here's what losing someone you've given your heart to for safekeeping feels like. it's kind of disingenuous to claim his fears are left untouched, when he's given a one-two knock out punch and is left having to deal with the fallout of that.

eta: and none of this actually touches on the fact that it's him that tells rook to grab the dagger before they go poof, so he's siting with that constant weight on his chest, too, but we'll dig into that at a later time because it's cold and my fingers are starting to get stiff.